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I’ve been misremembering that Simone de Beauvoir quote this whole time. Like, I’ve been using it in arguments, and it’s just straight up not something she said. I feel like an idiot. Continue reading →

If you don’t know what’s going on in Austin, TX right now, tune in. Senator Wendy Davis is fighting for women’s rights by filibustering the SB5 bill, which would radically reduce Texan women’s ability to acces abortion clinics. If she can make it to midnight, this thing goes down.

June 17th (making this post very late) was the 40th anniversary of the start of Nixon’s War on Drugs. Since then, the U.S. government has spent an unbelievable amount of money, time, and manpower enforcing these laws – laws that essentially do nothing but declare certain market activities (namely: producing, trading, and consuming certain substances) criminal.

This video from the Foundation for Economic Education gives the numbers: In 2009, the federal government spent $2,094,510,000 housing drug-related criminals. In 2007, 13% of all arrests were as a result of drug prohibition. And even with all the effort, 47% of Americans over the age of 12 have admitted to using illegal drugs.

Ask yourself: what would America look like if drugs were decriminalized? What can we determine about criminalizing substances from the Prohibition of the 1920’s? And how much better off would the United States be with the resources that are currently being spent fighting the drug war?

I am all for destroying the undeniably racist Arizona SB 1070 bill, which requires all immigrants in the state of Arizona to carry their registration papers with them at all times. This bill has been under fire since its inception in April of last year, and has been covered by media from the ultra-credible to the lowliest blog.

“We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.”

The hacker group Lulzsec has been taking some big action recently, against big business and even the CIA website. They claim that they’re just doing it for the lulz. For the most part, I’ve been laughing along with them. But when the contact info of hundreds of private citizens is released on the Internet…

They’re not discriminating in their attacks anymore – they’re taking on everyone – governments to innocent individuals. It might be time to stop laughing, and start tightening some Internet security.